Member Relations
During the 2010-2012 governance planning meetings, several ideas emerged as potential free services for members, for instance, submission-based data when arXiv's metadata structure is ready; institutional repository bulk download. Member institutions are also very keen on informing their scientists and researchers about arXiv's business model (e.g.,arXiv LibGuide to share with their faculty and students in related disciplines). Implementing these features may require significant staff time. Therefore these services need to be considered in the context of arXiv's current maintenance and development priorities. For 2013, within the context of Member Relations, we'd like to focus on the following issues:
...
Conference Call: April 15, 8pm EDT (Zhixiong) & April 25, 9:30am EDT
Meeting Notes:
- Zhixiong: the National Science Library (Beijing) has put together a working group (arXiv Service Group). This group is composed of librarians from several different institutions. One goal for the year is to raise awareness of arXiv among researchers (especially in non-physics areas). They would appreciate any promotional material arXiv could provide.
- Zhixiong: another goal of the Service Group is to conduct a survey to discover how arXiv is used by researchers and students, the level of knowledge about arXiv, and what problems researchers may have with using arXiv. This may be of general value to arXiv.
...
Conference Call: May 10, 9am EDT (Uwe) - another one with Yuri & Philip TBD
Meeting Notes:
- Question about why arXiv may need more revenues. Because the current budget is based on operational costs and does not factor in adding new features, revamping software, etc.
- Question about IT staffing. A few months ago, arXiv team decided not to migrate the browse component of arXiv to Invenio. There are a number of factors behind this decision. The main reasons for re-evaluation were slow progress by our team in the migration, an understanding that replication of arXiv functionality in Invenio involved rather more coding that we had earlier imagined, and pressure from our advisory board to address other issues. Instead of this large-scale migration we have decided to refocus our efforts on continuing to develop arXiv within its existing technology infrastructure and will reassess our strategy to use Invenio as platform for arXiv next year.
- Esther stated that German scientists like arXiv lean and simple, operated at low cost. We need to make a very clear case why extra money would be required. She said that if there were a "give button" on arXiv it would make sense to earmark and carefully communicate the use to which this money would be put. Better to have a specific project in mind that general support.
- Question: Why is there a reserve fund? --> The purpose of the arXiv reserve fund is to support unexpected expenses to ensure a sound business model. This is a common practice for organizations to ensure funds needed for closing the business, covering unexpected expenses.
- Question: Are there any institutions with rank>200 who would be willing to pay if there were a lower tier? à We have not asked so we don't know. However we are aware that some institutions are finding even the lowest tier not affordable due to their budget challenges.
- Germany would like to have a more "fair" model (higher fees for the top tier uses) but understands the challenges in complicating the current system by introducing another detail that would require individual negotiations with the top users. Oya suggests that for next year's fees, we might include for very heavy users (top 10-20) an invitation to contribute additional funds due to their high use.
Collaboration with Publishers and Societies
- In celebration of the arXiv's 20th anniversary, on September 23, 2011 Cornell University Library (CUL) hosted a meeting at Cornell with the representatives from several publishers and societies that are interested in Cornell's sustainability planning efforts. We will resume this investigation and discuss the feasibility and desirability of establishing a research and innovation collaboration in support of arXiv. This effort is envisioned to entail a separate funding stream (created by participating publishers and societies) from the operational budget, which includes resources for the routine and core services currently provided by the arXiv team (including essential updates). Please see the September 2011 planning meeting summary about the outcomes of a collaboration discussion with a group of publisher and society representatives. We would like to review, prioritize, and move our initial meeting recommendations into action. What are your recommendations?
- With regard to recent U.S. legislation that mandates scientists and researchers make their federally-funded data and publication available via open access, what are the possible (and desired) role that arXiv can play?
...
Conference Call: May 21, 10:30am EDT
Meeting Notes:
Research and Development Agenda
- So far, CUL's sustainability planning efforts focused on arXiv's operational budget to support the core services and arXiv's strengths in order to stay mission-centric. How can we move beyond the current sustainability model that focuses on operations to a strategic plan for arXiv's further development and innovation? Beyond the 2013 Roadmap, we would like to set a 3-5 year strategic plan for arXiv (encompassing all aspects of arXiv including user support, IT, moderation, etc.). Do you recommend any strategies or tools in setting priorities and assessing collaboration models? Do you know of any successful models we can learn from? We also need to find additional funds but we want this goal to be driven by an agenda.
- Based on your knowledge of arXiv, its principles, and the repository ecology, do you have any recommended R&D areas that we should be focusing on?
- arXiv is approached on a regular basis by outside groups asking for advice or special services. Sometimes the assistance requested is minor, but often it would require devoting some amount of staff effort. We need guidelines for determining under what circumstances we will allocate resources in order to collaborate with an outside organization. We would like to develop a methodology to guide us make decisions about potential working collaborations with outside groups. Do you have any recommendations?
...
Conference Call: April 22, 11:30am EDT
Meeting Notes:
- Tommy presented six questions to consider: Ideas for improving the arXiv interface; adding new functions; who can submit to arXiv; considering a peer review function; information exchange between arXiv and local IRs; ORCID implementation.
- To identify an R&D agenda, Mackenzie suggests that we should think of a set of categories and then see what can be rolled into the operation and addressed in the short term and requires real R&D. Possible categories: Interface, author identity, infrastructure scalability, mining arXiv.
- Discussion of the OSTP OA mandate and questions about whether arXiv could be a fee-based submission venue to meet the mandate - what added value might make this worthwhile. Mackenzie stresses that what is needed is a system for getting credit when one deposits to an open access system. For instance, can a scientist only post on arXiv with a DOI and use this as an academic achievement in support of his/her tenure process (not requiring a peer-reviewed publication)? Can we build some article level metrics into arXiv? This is an R&D area for consideration.
- One idea to consider is positioning arXiv as a preservation system and the possibility of developing for-fee-services for journals wanting to archive on arXiv, or even whether we might charge depositors.
- Tommy wonders if arXiv should promote itself as a way to meet green OA mandates and if and how it will meet the requirements emerging in different countries (compliance issues).
- Mackenzie recommends that when we enter a new collaboration, we need to assess the costs and do not enter in a partnership without a clear benefit for arXiv - whether it is visibility or additional revenues. She wonders if we should work out ways to charge for our services.
- Mackenzie questions whether we can develop a set of mining tools and monetize by providing cost-recovery services (similar to the data mining tools HathiTrust Research Center is providing) We can avoid conflict with free open-access to corpus by still providing that free. Mackenzie suggests Sloan Foundation as a potential funding sources. Many research groups and publishers are interested in data mining tools.
- Mackenzie says that supporting research data is a big issue and that we must be careful not to get distracted from our open access article mission. Possible collaboration with Dryad would be interesting.